The feminine appeal of British horror cinema

When Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964, Bryan Forbes) was set for release, cinema managers were advised that ‘feminine appeal’ was a strong angle for publicity, and the film went on to be a critical and commercial success. Yet, it is relatively unknown in existing academic histories of horror cinema. The female lead, spiritualist premise and psychological horror make it an uneasy bedfellow with existing accounts of 1960s British horror films, which focus on the sexualised colour-saturated violence of Hammer Studios and its associated offspring. This article reverses this trend by revealing a cycle of 1960s black-and-white British horror films whose primary textual address is to women, manifested through complex female characters, interiority and stories of motherhood, stillbirth and child murder. Utilising Mary Ann Doane's work on maternal melodrama, the article explores the parallels between this cycle and the woman's film, and draws upon reception analysis in order to consider how the critics responded to the female-centred films. It is suggested that not only have film historians failed to note that this cycle exists, but more importantly they have also failed to understand how frightening the films could be for a female audience.